Are you sick to your stomach? Yes, .Metoo
The Capitol is covered in mud. Again. Somewhere in the dim recesses of my mind, I can recall a time when the sight of that white dome thrilled me.
I can also vaguely remember a time, back before the travesty of Bush v. Gore, when I felt awe walking past the Supreme Court. And if I try really hard, I can summon the lost sensation of pride in covering the White House.
But all that is utterly changed.
It was wrenching to watch the futile Iraq War unfold. It is jarring to think I could live through three sagas of impeachment. But I most dread the rhyming history we are plunged into now: the merciless pummeling of a woman who dares to obstruct the glide path of a conservative Supreme Court nominee.
It is unnerving to think how far women have come, only to find ourselves dragged back to the same place.
It has been almost exactly 27 years since the Anita Hill-clarence Thomas hearings, and we are still defensively explaining — including to our troglodyte president — why women do not always tell authorities about verbal and physical sexual assaults.
We are still watching a bookish university professor from the West, who tried to anonymously report an alleged blight on the character of a man about to ascend to a lifetime of power, get smeared as a demanding, mixed-up, uptight, loony fantasist.
Like Eve with the apple, she schemed to “come out of the night like a missile and destroy a man,” as Republican Sen. Alan Simpson said of Hill.
We are still watching on the Republican side of the panel an all-white male chorus — two of these singers were there three decades ago — plotting to win at all costs.
I didn’t sleep the week of the Hill-thomas hearings. At first, I was feverishly trying to figure out what was true.
But it quickly became apparent that Thomas was lying.
His friends and supporters had talked publicly about how, at Yale Law School, Thomas was a regular patron of X-rated movie houses and enjoyed describing the porn to friends afterward.
But that was not introduced into testimony by either the Republicans or the Democrats. Instead, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch — who is still on the Judiciary Committee at age 84 — suggested that a man as esteemed as Thomas could not possibly know the language of porn.
Hatch preposterously accused Hill of scavenging her testimony about Long Dong Silver from an old law case, and her story about Thomas asking “Who put pubic hair on my Coke?” from the novel, “The Exorcist.”
No one was trying to figure out the truth or do what was best for the court and the country. Republicans only cared about ramming through a right-wing justice. Even though they were the majority, Democrats were cowed by Thomas wrapping himself in the charged symbolism of the civil rights movement he had always scorned. And they were gun-shy after criticism of their initial bungling of Hill’s revelation. Joe Biden, committee chair, canceled the testimony of Hill’s backup witnesses from work.
Teddy Kennedy was mute, hobbled by his own past sins. The feminists were less concerned with Hill’s humiliation than with using her as a bludgeon to block a justice who would be devastating on women’s rights.
After a three-day FBI investigation, the White House declared Hill’s charges “unfounded.” Then agents were pressured by Republicans into providing affidavits suggesting that Hill had embellished her testimony.
Anita Hill was alone, in a hearing room full of Republican liars and Democratic cowards, getting ripped apart as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” in the words of Kavanaugh pal turned Hillary henchman David Brock; and this in front of her elderly parents.
Post .Metoo, the Republicans know they have to be more careful on the surface. Their work to discredit Christine Blasey Ford will have to be outsourced; consider the outrageous attempt by Ed Whelan — a friend of Brett Kavanaugh’s who heads a prominent conservative think tank on ethics — to throw suspicion on a look-alike classmate at Georgetown Prep.
Blasey is dealing with some demonic forces not in play with Hill: a vicious partisan internet that drove her out of her house and being discredited personally by a president who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault, and who is advised by the man who enabled Roger Ailes’ loathsome behavior at Fox News.
We haven’t forgotten our history. But we still seem doomed to repeat it.